Many times Sensei has said you have to have a theme song for your projects. You may have certainly noticed that Sensei is old school, prog-rock and somewhat metal oriented. Spock’s Beard is a recent discovery and the group has direct roots with Transatlantic.

This latest album is a great source of inspiration, so if you have a ten minute walk ahead of, fire it up and it will get your head straight for serious productivity, creativity, or pure coding marathons.

Sensei recently gave up FogBugz. This was not because of FogBuz, as it is a great product. But Sensei realized that it was not meeting his needs. It was too much. When on the hunt, you can’t be slowed down, and sometimes you have to jettison the extra weight. To be fair, the context here is a prototyping project, where errors / foibles / new features need to be captured. FogBugz is great a teams, but it does require, well, too many clicks. You should always ask yourself this question: which James Bond do I want to be?

Which Bond gets the babe? Pretty easy choice. The unfettered thinker makes them swoon. The guy with the helmet …not so much.

Keeping It Real By Keeping It Simple

Yep – Sensei sounds like a whiny Apple-simplify-your-life-and-wear-a-black-turtle-neck Zen iPad fan boy. Well, that’s not right either. There’s just the right tools for the the right job. So when in the fight with the development environment, brain firing on all cylinders, Seseni uses Workflowy. You can quickly categorize your lists / sentences / thoughts as you go. Just typing, no modal dialog boxes, no creating an item, waiting for it to save, clicking, scrolling, more dialog boxes.

Before you attack, Sensei is not saying this will work for teams, for bug resolution, and other endeavors that FogBugz does very well. But it’s all about eliminating the tactics that get in the way of you achieving your goals. This is critical. And when prototyping you need as much room in your head as possible so you solve the bugs, but not spend more time tracking the bugs. Below is a sample. Issues and features, pretty easy. Click it to see the details.

So What? Well, How About Taking It a Step Further

Sensei hopes that the enterprising readers out there can take this idea and run with it: Why not create system that parses the format shown above? When you edit, each line gets a Guid. Then, start at the top level. Each item at that level is story or a deliverable, maybe broken down by screen or function. A child of each story will have an Issues or Features item, and the child items of Issues naturally belongs to Issues. All else would be ignored when converting to a database record, yet retained in your notes.

This would be your starting pointing. Because each of these items has an identifier, later you could parse them into a database format, assign people, etc. The point is that the starting point is easier, is more productive because you just type. That way your work gets done, and you feel more like him.

Sensei is a libertarian – so you can interpret that to mean few rules, respect others freedom, government and busy bodies “leave me the hell alone”, stay-outta-my-way-attitude-person is his motto. That means the only way to drive is with the stick. Automatic is for the soccer moms. Javascript is like driving manual transmission – sometimes you grind the gears.

It’s not Javascript’s fault, it’s Sensei’s fault. Now you can see why he writes in the third person, ’cause it’s easier to remove yourself from these type of dumb mistakes when you can treat your persona as separate person!! If you see the issue, leave a comment before I post the resolution.

Of late, Sensei needs to keep a clear head. That has meant learning to segment ideas and really, really, really focus on streamlined features. This is hard. Not because Sensei has a plethora of great ideas. That would be a nice problem to have. Many times in software development you end up this guy:

This is the state where you have things you want to accomplish, yet even when you pair things down to the “essential”, other essential, critical factors must be taken into consideration before you create a mess. This is life calling, and that string which suspends that giant sword that you noticed hovering over your head is about to snap. There is a good chance that you need more discipline, better execution tactics, far better honed chops, you name the metaphor. Sensei has been at this game for over 22 years, and still the speed that thought takes to become reality is way too slow.

With great sarcasm you can remind your self that some of the best work lays ahead, but the reality is that you still need to fight to be fluent, you have to claw your way to a Zen state of mind / no-mind. So chose, the art of bushido or the art of BS. Or maybe work smarter and enjoy life.

Before Sensei leaves you, ponder this: does “being done” mean that you’ve dropped off a product but have to get on the phone in order to make changes, and maybe now that you are struggling why couldn’t you figure out to take time when it was more critical to be fluent with your productivity?

Like this:

If you are lucky, you can experience a life through the course of a day. Consider it the antithesis of ground hogs day. Instantaneous history, melancholy,!and certainty all at once. You are here, where do you go?